cover image A Creature of Moonlight

A Creature of Moonlight

Rebecca Hahn. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $17.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-544-10935-3

In Hahn’s polished, confident debut, the daughter of a runaway princess and a dragon comes of age. Neither a retelling nor a subversion of a familiar myth, this profound and original story feels like a long-lost classic fairy-tale. Its heroine, Marni, bewitches with her quaint, idiomatic narration and her core of stubbornness. She is knitting moonlight into a vengeance to destroy her murderous uncle, the king: “I lace it with the sharpest tip of a claw, the hottest flick of a flame, the empty nothing of a moonlit sky.” Her dragon’s blood increasingly lures her to the magical woods, even as its trees encroach on the realm. In an emotional journey full of twists and turns, Marni comes to doubt her own righteousness. She wonders, too, whether she belongs among humans or in the woods whose soul “will fold itself into you, and you will never know it’s there, not until you’re ten nights out and there’s not a thing that can bring you back again.” Hahn thoroughly examines the sorrows and beauties of both worlds before bringing the narrative to satisfying close. Ages 12–up. (May)